THIS IS THE WAY OF OUR TIMES: A man falls asleep reading a fine account of the rise and fall of the American Newspaper (in words printed on paper, in a magazine), from Gold Rush San Francisco to an equally tenuous present. He wakes to another rosy-fingered dawn over the White Mountains, as in a fable, or not, his children crawling all over him, kneeing him in the groin, laughing, pouting, fighting for his attention, clamoring for juice.

And the dreams go something like this. (The author at work.)Later he takes his coffee (and a pancake formed in the shape of a squirrel by his visiting mother-in-law) to the basement, where, surrounded by exposed insulation, and with the light coming up on the trees outside, he puts off the task at hand—that of writing the texts for a guide to winter adventure in Mammoth, as commissioned by the Ski Area.

He scrolls through the morning's tweets, comes upon the following from (of all possible sources) the Comfort Inn in Bishop (@ComfortInn395):

Check this video out--Winter in the Woods-Backcountry Skiing in the Sierra Nevada http://bit.ly/Lbywl.

And so he does, of course, and is immediately transported far beyond his cluttered desk, beyond the world of newspapers and social media and a too-sluggish computer, to an earlier time—a better time, he cannot help but think—and a time very soon to come: